Baselitz and His Generation Poem by Michael Hofmann

For Hai-Dang Phan

I have no doubt where they will go. They walk
the one life offered from the many chosen.
 — Robert Lowell

They are all also, it should be remembered, West German artists, with the partial exception of Penck, and are all male.
 — John-Paul Stonard

He was born in the countryside / the provinces / the blameless sticks
in ( false) Waltersdorf (recte) Dresden
in what is now Czechoslovakia / the Czech Republic (laughs) / Czechia, if it
ever catches on

what's it to you.

Stripped of his East German citizenship, he fled
on foot with a handful of pop music cassettes
in a pantechnicon mit Kind und Kegel
in pandemonium
nach vorne
cool as you like, in an S-Bahn from the Russian Sector, in the clothes he
stood up in.



Germany (thus Goethe's friend Mme de Staël) is the land of poets and thinkers
der Dichter und Denker
or of judges and executioners
der Richter und Henker
or of Richter and Penck.

He drew innocent geometrical shapes
boxed shirts / boxer shorts / boxy suits
men without women
hairy heroes of the Thirty Years' War / lansquenets / strangely fibrous figures
a bit like those New Yorker caveman cartoons

empty Renaissance helmets / mostly US fighter jets
the suicides of Stammheim.

He took the name of an American boxing promoter
a German Ice Age geologist
the village of his birth
the one he was given.

His first work to really catch on / be banned / get him in trouble / cause widespread
revulsion was Onkel Rudi

Die große Nacht im Eimer
Höhere Wesen befahlen: rechte obere Ecke schwarz malen! / oyez, oyez, oyez,
Politburo decree: upper right-hand corner in ebony!

ohne Titel
a mural in the cafeteria of the Hygiene Museum, since painted over.

He wound up in Düsseldorf
Berlin, doh!
la bella Italia
tax-exempt Ireland of Böll- and Beuys-ful memory, where the earth apples bloom.

His paintings were fuzzy geometry
like the country, ripped across the middle
upside down (especially effective: the trees)
shoveled out of the window
later withdrawn.

His favored technique involved stick figures
Polke dots
out of focus grisaille photographs
scribbling on his pictures
woodcuts à la Dürer.

The numerals on his graphics represent a recent shopping bill
an attempt to disconcert the onlooker / ostranenie
amortization
bar code
some other code
Durchnummerierung.

He studied with Joseph Beuys
the least doctrinaire painter he could find
for the best part of ten years, in East and West, so that everything canceled
itself out

what's it to you
he didn't.